Aftermath

The story: Tina Chep will tell you that Time is viscous and abrasive and that time travel is like travelling through quicksand. Tina Chep will tell you also that time machines are sturdy constructions which do not last more than a couple of voyages, and that many are lost on the way. Have you ever seen a visitor from the future? Of course not. They are much too few. Tina Chep is one of them though. Her curiosity overcomes her misgivings and her fears. There is much to learn from travelling to the past.

The science: I put a minimum of science in this scene. The time is about 65 million years ago. The Chixulub Meteor has crashed a few months before. The location is in a remote corner of the Earth, far from the crash. Wildfires have raged for weeks and the skies are starting to clear from the soot, ash, and ejected debris. Life is slowly starting again. On the devastated soil, ferns are sprouting up riotously, hiding the remains of a former age. Research on plant remains has show this so-called fern spike, just after the crash. I have made one scientific assumption which has not been confirmed yet: that a few scattered dinosaurs survived the crash in remote, protected places (I have added one in the background). They were too few however to start up new lineages, except for the birds as we know now. The mammals were also severely hit of course, but they survived. We may wonder, however, what strange species were lost forever…

I started this scene a few years ago, but did not go beyond the bare landscape and sky. The sky is an exr image made from a previously rendered media sky, and is the only illumination except for a white screen behind the camera. The landscape itself consists of three height_fields, including the water surface. All the dead wood was modelled in Silo2; the T-rex skeletons, the dilophosaurus (anachronistic for this time period, but who cares), the ferns, and Tina Chep (Miki2) were posed with Poser 7/8. The Time Machine was modelled with Silo2 and textured using Edouard Poor’s proximity macro for the ribs and the new aoi texture for the sphere. The machine was inspired by the time machine in Edgard P. Jacobs' Le Piège Diabolique (1962) a Blake & Mortimer adventure [ http://www.blakeetmortimer.com/spip.php?article27 ]. Rune’s fastgrass macro was used for the soil.